New York Times, Thursday, October 16, 2014

My soccer-playing, Landon Donovan-jersey-wearing son, Donovan, will be happy when he sees his name in the paper. That said, 57-Across was not the seed for the puzzle but actually the last of the themes answers I found. At first I just looked for answers with repeating letters, not sure where it would lead. Three-letter strings seemed promising and from there I narrowed the choices, eliminating repeats within single words (e.g., Chihuahua) and ones that didn't break evenly across separate words (e.g., atom bombs). By then it was down to a short list of candidates. Adding another angle — e.g., using all names, spelling something with the combined letter strings — was a bit much to ask, so after a final cut (and one close call) I went with this selection. The theme answers felt like a good mix and worked well in the grid.

FYI, the "close call" in my final cut was PIPER PERABO. In her favor: I've seen her on TV and she seems lovely. On the other hand: (a) She's only lovely if you know her and her fame is probably marginal for a theme answer, especially one using word play; (b) The PER in her name and in Percy Shelley's name seemed like a repeat better to avoid; and (c) I didn't want the theme to be too name-heavy and preferred using no more than two names if possible. Another Hollywood name left on the cutting room floor was IRWIN WINKLER. My regrets to his fans and to Piper's.

Happy hunting! Hope you enjoy the puzzle.

John's manuscript had the overlapping three-letter parts indicated by circles. I thought that made the puzzle too easy. Anyway, I'm always in need of fresh Thursday-ish gimmicks, so the circles are gone, and — voilà — a Thursday!

Tricksy stuff today, REPEAT hinting at the fact that certain three-letter words do double-duty. Took me a while to cotton to the gimmick, but PERCY BYSSHE (SHE)LLY cleared it up. Nice find there! I liked how the overlaps were all actual quality three-letter words: PIE, LET, SHE, DON, PAL.

Interesting point to me today was the placement of the revealer — it's so hard to get a six-letter word down in the last across answer. Seems like an odd statement, doesn't it? How hard could that be, considering many, many puzzles use five-letter revealers in that location without a hitch? But when you have a five-entry theme, the addition of that sixth letter on the revealer makes for a huge change in difficulty.

Why? With five themers, you're almost always going to have some overlap between one of your themers and your revealer. Look at how much real estate there is between the end of LANDONOVAN and REPEAT. That 6x4 SE corner is no joke. John does well to make it a 6x4 block rather than a 6x3 (as he could have by moving LANDONOVAN down one row), since the extra space gives him more flexibility in that SE corner. Impressive that John nailed it.

I found it a little odd that WHOOPIE PIES turned into WHOOPIES was included. The others have three-letter words unrelated to the base phrase, so to see PIES and PIE felt odd. Consistency is something I find elegant in a puzzle, and WHOOPIES felt like the one that didn't seem like the others. I do like how hilarious the term sounds (yes, I'm a fourth-grader at heart) and how delicious it looks, though.

Smooth offering today, with just NEBS making me scratch my head (but apparently it's a real thing!), and a couple of nice variations on clever clues for short answers (ANODE the favorite for this physics junkie). I would have loved if the beautiful PRIME RIB and CORNUCOPIA could have gotten clever clues as well, since devilishly hard clues for those nice long entries make them even better.